The team
Leon Kelvin Li
Founder and sole developer of Curio. He designs, builds and ships the iOS app, API, content systems and distribution.
Leon owns the product design, engineering, content systems and distribution behind Curio.
Curio
Curio is a full-screen reading app, available on the App Store and maintained by Leon alone. It keeps the scroll mechanic people already know and changes the payload: short, quality-checked knowledge cards, one idea per card, with an AI layer that opens any card up and a feature set that runs from branching scenarios to offline reading.
Leon ships Curio in the four languages he speaks — English, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish. The app's multilingual feed is not a translation afterthought; it is the founder reading his own app in his own languages.
How one person ships this
The honest answer is tooling and discipline. Curio's pipeline is a chain of gates that refuse rather than warn: content that fails an editorial, safety or readability bar does not ship, and anything short of a near-perfect score goes to a human review queue rather than to the feed. The engineering has the same posture — the last step of CI reintroduces real, previously shipped defects into the source and requires the test that claims to cover each one to go red. A guard that cannot fail is not a guard.
Before Curio
- GOSVEA Inc — software engineer and SEO specialist (part-time, 2026–present). Sole developer of the company's iOS app; built an AI location-intelligence system over nine external data APIs and launched FirstCPR.com.
- Scenara — founder (October 2025 – April 2026). A full-stack prediction-market simulation platform: probability pricing, position tracking, payouts, automated market resolution. Wound down in April 2026 — prediction markets remain tightly regulated in the markets it targeted, and he chose to stop rather than keep building toward a launch that could not happen.
- Orryin — a trading platform concept letting people invest without a US SSN, using their own country's ID instead. Built from his own experience hitting that wall; stopped when the regulatory documentation burden outgrew one person.
- ATLAS — an ongoing, public machine-learning research system for short-horizon FX prediction: calibrated gradient boosting, meta-labeling, purged walk-forward validation, and a pre-registered forward test. On GitHub.
- GTSP Group — robotics development intern (2025–2026): sensor calibration, actuator tuning, control-logic diagnostics.
He studies Computer Engineering at California State University, East Bay (A.S., Green River College; Phi Theta Kappa; founder and president of its Coding Club), and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Common questions
- Who is Leon Kelvin Li?
- Leon Kelvin Li (also written Leon Li) is a software engineer and the founder of Curio, the full-screen iOS reading app at trycurio.app. He built and launched the entire product solo in mid-2026.
- Who made the Curio app?
- Curio was designed, engineered and shipped by one person: Leon Kelvin Li. That includes the iOS app, the backend API, and the content and moderation pipeline.
- Is Curio really a one-person app?
- Yes. The team size is one. Leon Kelvin Li is Curio's founder and sole developer, responsible for the product, engineering, content systems and distribution.
Find him
For anything Curio: support@trycurio.app.